NICK DENTON built a fiefdom of blogs from the popularity of his
snarky media gossip site Gawker. Then one day he realized he was 3
million page views down. Now loyalists are bolting as the Internet
industrialist shakes up his world {BY TIME MURPHY}

A bold question, particularly when you consider that Gawker, the
must-read media industry blog launched in 2002, was once the place for a
daily diet of tidbits on everything from Rupert Murdoch's latest
dastardly deed to what the willowy girls at Vogue were (or were not)
eating in the Conde Nast cafeteria.

But in mid-January, after dropping 3 million page views between
October and December 2007, Nick Denton, the site's cagey founder,
decided to do what entrepreneurs do best-take a risk. While Gawker once
focused almost entirely on the foibles of an elite New York City media
core, it would suddenly find space for the Tom Cruise/Britney Spears
bits covered to death on countless other websites. Gawker was going
mainstream.

Many viewed the change as a desperate effort to cash in on low fare
like "pictures of Lindsay Lohan's vagina," as Choire
Sicha, Gawker's former managing editor, jokingly put it. Sicha,
who's also gay, quit the blog at the end of December--mainly, he
claims, because he was burnt out. "I was tired of working 14 hours
a day six days a week. I hadn't been to the gym since I started
that job."

Denton didn't win any loyalty points when in December he
announced he was tweaking how his writers were going to be paid. Rather
than give people a flat fee per post, Gawker would augment writers'
base salaries with bonuses generated by how many times people viewed
their posts. Sicha and another senior blogger resigned.

Whether it was boredom or bravado that inspired Denton to shake up
his business is anyone's guess. But what's important is that
he appears to have unleashed on his own staff a bit of the signature
bitchiness he used to aim at media moguls. Had the general turned on his
troops? "There are certainly signs that Gawker ... is in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil," wrote Allen Salkin in
a January 13 article in The New York Times. "As messy and mean as
Gawker could be, it was an addiction to many journalists, obsessively
clicking in search of the diversion that fresh gossip about colleagues
and their bosses offered from the toil of reporting and editing the
news."

NICK DENTON DECLINED TO BE INTERVIEWED for this piece--"I
really would, but am so busy this month"--despite numerous phone
calls and e-mail requests. "And everything is out there pretty
much," he offered by e-mail. It wasn't a surprise. Like gay
Internet potentate Matt Drudge, Denton rarely speaks to the press.

"He'll only talk to you if he has a message to get
out," says Sklar. For example, when Denton announced that he would
become Gawker's managing editor late last year (to fill the place
Sicha left open) and would post items himself, he promptly got in touch
with Sklar. "That first day, all of a sudden he was going
pingping-ping to me," she says, mimicking the sound of instant
messages arriving, "about numbers and this and that. He wanted me
to write about stuff."

A British-born former Financial Times reporter who made a small
fortune on an early Internet social-marketing venture before starting
Gawker, Denton parlayed its initial success into a full-on armada of 15
blogs, each one fixated on a different niche. There's Valleywag for
Silicon Valley, Defamer for Hollywood's entertainment industry, and
Wonkette for Washington politics. Jalopnik covers cars, Gizmodo takes on
gadgets, and 109 just launched to tackle your daily science-fiction
needs. Altogether Gawker Media brings in an estimated $10 million to $12
million annually, according to New York magazine's
back-of-the-envelope calculations last fall.

Although some of the sites attract millions more page views than
Gawker, the flagship blog, with its addictive cocktail of news, smear,
and innuendo, has earned Denton his "dark lord" moniker.

"He's got a big head-literally," says one leading
media critic who's been zapped frequently by Gawker and won't
go on the record for fear of reprisal. "He looks like Linus [from
"Peanuts"], and he wears the stripy shirts to go with it. But
he's not a huge personality. I think he likes being the man behind
the curtain."

One current Gawker contributor, who spoke anonymously because
"my job is on the line," says that working for Denton
"has always been nerve-racking. But he knows what he's
doing--or at least is good at making it up. He doesn't sell out his
employees if he believes in them. Nor is he afraid to whip people into
shape."

So it's hard to figure why he'd let Sicha and another
popular Gawker writer, Emily Gould, walk away. Sicha's tart, brainy voice made him a popular blogger for the site, in addition to his role
as managing editor. Surely his departure would put a dent in
Denton's coveted hits, right? As Reed Phillips of investment firm
Desilva and Phillips observes of successful blogs, "If the talent
goes away, then presumably the traffic follows."

Sicha says that Denton tried to get him to stay, offering to
relieve him of his managerial duties and leave him free to write.
"He just wrote me the other day, asking, 'Are you going to
write a column for me?'" says Sicha. An e-mail from Denton
dated January 28 says: "You could write about anything you cared
about, rather than cover the new bases--who knows, blogging could be
fun." Currently freelancing for The New York Observer and the Los
Angeles Times, Sicha says he's not going back--at least for now.

And while he won't quite condemn Denton's new payment
system, saying it could yield high-quality content and allow talented
writers (or nugget-finders) to make a great deal more money, he adds
vaguely, "I just don't like systems. I don't want to get
rich people richer."

"IF YOU ASKED NICK, 'HOW GAY ARE YOU?' he'd be,
like, 'What?'" says Sicha. Yet Gawker has long been
dedicated to covering people of interest to "the gays," as the
site calls us. Case in point: Two days after the Times story, Gawker
landed a major coup when it posted the now infamous video clip of Tom
Cruise's crazed remarks for a Church of Scientology event. Despite
the church's demands and threats of a lawsuit, Denton refused to
take it down. Traffic exploded, catapulting January's number of
page views higher than any month's in the previous year. The video
has since been viewed more than 2 million times. And while that was
perhaps Gawker's pinnacle of gay-interest coverage, countless items
have been posted over the years that could easily have appeared on gay
blogs like Queerty or Towleroad--posts like "Former gay-porn star
and current GOP Marine mascot Matt Sanchez is, apparently, getting
'stalked' by a gay fake Marine" and blind items such as
"Which legendary American TV producer of late night comedy has been
constantly seen walking back and forth at St. Barth's Saline gay
beach?" The site is especially cutting when it comes to celebrities
widely believed to be closeted gays, such as Cruise, Anderson Cooper,
and Clay Aiken.

"We would get a lot of hate mail from gay people saying we
were homophobic," remembers Sicha. "Well, you're not the
only ones with sexuality, so get over yourself! We got hate mail from
the Jews too." (Gawker's writers--many of them Jewish,
including Denton--mock "the Jews" as often as they do
"the gays.")

But that bitchiness can feed on itself, creating a vortex of
self-pleasure bordering on spiritual nausea. "My boyfriend
guest-edited for a week in 2005," says Sklar, "and he was,
like, 'Man, you just want to be mean, you can't help it. You
feel that muscle developing.' It flees a side of you that you would
share only with your closest friends. It coarsens the discourse."

One has to wonder whether the latest changes at Gawker are
Denton's own expression of unstoppable meanness--not that there
aren't already enough external examples. Earlier this year, Denton
posted a picture of the scantily clad 25-year-old daughter of media
mogul Steve Brill, which he'd lifted from her Facebook page,
causing the networking site to threaten to bar Denton. It was just the
kind of gambit for hits that makes some question whether Gawker's
impresario possesses even a rudimentary sense of decency.

"A media columnist once described him to me as allergic to
humans," says Jesse Oxfeld, a former Gawker staffer who claims
Denton fired him without explanation two years ago. "I think
[it's] in some way a fair characterization."

DENTON HAS SCOFFED AT PREDICTIONS of Gawker's demise
post-Sicha, saying such doomsday chatter always accompanies staff
turnovers. But after previous exits Denton wasn't writing his own
posts, which are newsy, to the point, and not especially witty--in other
words, nothing like Sicha's. And while the not-gay but gayishly
bitchy Joshua David Stein had picked up some of Sicha's slack, he
too departed at the end of January. The question remains whether that
voice will be necessary if Denton can corral enough eyeballs simply by
writing about Britney's new "manny" or Lindsay's
latest arrest.

And the voice could be inappropriate if Denton's goal of
breaking hard news on the site comes to pass. In fact, he's already
running Gawker as a news site, says Sicha. "He has people putting
pitches on his desk in the morning, and he'll nix stories.
He's a tough boss for reporters."

But other Gawker gawkers are skeptical about whether the site can
break anything substantial beyond leaked internal e-mail or IM exchanges
from, say, Viacom. Standard Gawker practice is to follow up by urging
readers-many of who toil for such media giants--to contribute whatever
they know about the story. It's a kind of collective real-time
bitchfest of reportage played out publicly over hours, days, or weeks.

Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who penned aNew York magazine story
assessing Gawker's cultural impact, doesn't think Denton has
or wants to invest in the kind of resources that produce comprehensive
fully reported stories at more traditional outlets. "Everyone knows
a little something if you're connected with a bunch of mid-level
journalists," she says. "But that's not the same as
having people who are totally dedicated to reporting."

That doesn't mean he won't try. If anything is clear
about Nick Denton, he's not about to bow out. With his blog empire
worth as much as $15 million by some estimates, it's not about the
money for Denton. "He's the dark overlord," says Sklar.
"He's got an in wherever he wants to go."

Whatever that next move, Nick Denton is likely to surprise. Says
Grigoriadis, "He's certainly not someone to be
underestimated--as we've all found out."

DAMON WOLF

Poster Boy

AS A SOPHOMORE at Louisiana State University, Damon Wolf was
already done with college. "My mother tells me that upon entry to
kindergarten I was ready to graduate high school," says the
36-year-old advertising executive behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, and Lost in Translation. Itching to get on
with life, Wolf and a friend hit the road for California with a couple
hundred dollars between them. "I didn't know what I wanted to
do," he remembers. "I mean, really, the weather took me
here."

After sleeping on friends' couches in Los Angeles for a while,
Wolf landed a job as the receptionist at Frankfurt Balkind advertising
agency, a boutique firm (now called Bemis Balkind) specializing in print
advertising for major motion picture studios. "l always assumed
that the studios had done [the advertising] themselves," he says.
"I didn't know there was a huge industry around it." Or
that selling blockbusters would eventually become his
multimillion-dollar future.

Wolf was no stranger to success (back in Louisiana his family owned
Wolf Baking Co., which made Sunbeam bread), but he always knew he
wasn't conventional. When he was 19 he came out to his family at a
Christmas-party. Yet even as a Southern boy he says he never worried
about being ostracized. "We're from Louisiana," Wolf
explains. "We put our eccentricities out on the porch and we let
everybody see them."

This may explain why as a receptionist Wolf was no small
personality. At Frankfurt Balkind he quickly developed a strong rapport
with the firm's clients. "In my opinion, the receptionist is
the most important person in the company," he explains. "They
know all the clients--they know everything--and they really are the face
of the company. And let me tell you, I was the best receptionist
ever--everybody in town knew me." It was while Wolf worked the desk
that Randi Braun, an old Frankfurt employee who became MGM's senior
vice president of creative advertising, called and offered the firm a
campaign: the 1997 Richard Gere film Red Comer. With one stipulation:
Braun said Wolf had to be her account executive. And just like that Wolf
became an ad man.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After heading up his own accounts for a couple of years, Wolf
decided--at age 27--to start his own company with his friends and
coworkers Charles Reimers and Jack and Jennifer Cain. "Youth and
stupidity will get you everywhere," Wolf says, laughing. "It
just didn't seem like that big of a risk."

The four formed Crew Creative out of a small duplex in Los
Angeles's Larchmont Village neighborhood in 1999. They worked on
print campaigns for small independent and Canadian films with one
overarching philosophy: "Our goal is to drive people into seats
opening weekend," says Wolf. "That is it. That's what I
do."

Then one day Warner Bros. came calling with a little movie called
Eyes Wide Shut. It turned out to be the firm's big break. In eight
years Crew Creative has gone from a shoestring operation, putting
together their presentations at the Kinko's up the street, to a
company that has a staff of about 175 and expects 2008 revenues to be
$40 million.

Wolf built his empire while balancing a 10-year relationship to
Ignacio Valdes, an ob-gyn at Glendale Memorial Hospital in California.
The two broke up last fall and now share custody of their two sons,
Maximilian, age 6, and Samuel, age 4. Wolf makes it all look easy but
describes his success with characteristic Southern modesty: "If all
this went away tomorrow," he says, "I can still bag groceries.
I can get a job."--Corey Scholibo

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

DAVID BOHNETT

Do-gooder

THERE'S NO OBVIOUS SIGNAGE on the red brick building on South
Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, just a little nameplate that reads DAVID
BOHNETT FOUNDATION below the intercom at the iron gate. It's modest
and low-key, like the technology entrepreneur and philanthropist
himself.

Indeed, Bohnett, the founder of GeoCities (a precursor to Facebook
and other social networking sites) that he sold to Yahoo! for an
estimated $260 million in 1999, is not one to talk to the press. But
"if there's a benefit to being visible that helps further the
things we're trying to do with the foundation or the things
we're trying to do with these start-up companies"--he also
runs the venture capital firm Baroda Ventures--"I'm more than
willing to do that," he says.

Bohnett's foundation currently boasts over $30 million,
started with proceeds from the GeoCities sale. You may have experienced
his most famous philanthropic gesture to date: the creation of computer
labs--the David Bohnett CyberCenters--at LGBT centers and universities
nationwide. It was a program, he says, that never existed before.

"Cyber centers are needed for the same reasons gay and lesbian
centers are needed," he says. "People need a place to go for
the kind of social services the gay and lesbian centers provide, and the
cyber centers provide a place for people who don't have access to a
computer to apply for a job, apply to school, and communicate with
friends and relatives. It's providing a resource to help people
seek out what they need to improve their lives."

Much of what informs his philanthropic work comes from his time as
a graduate student at the University of Michigan, where he received his
MBA in finance in 1980. "I was volunteering through the gay student
union," says Bohnett, who later went on to volunteer at Los
Angeles's gay and lesbian center. "Michigan was very
progressive, and it was one of the early schools that had organized and
university-supported lesbian and gay campus activities. That was the
beginning of my activism."

These days Bohnett's activism doesn't stop with handing
over grant money or helping fund Internet start-ups (prior beneficiaries
have included NetZero.com, Stamps.com, and PlanetOut, which owns The
Advocate). He also seeks to change the political system through targeted
donations to gay-friendly candidates on the state level. "If
someone is interested in marriage equality, they're much better off
focusing on state battles than giving money to the national
parties," he says.

Bohnett lives with his longtime partner, television and radio
personality Tom Gregory, in Beverly Hills, where the two men sometimes
hold political fund-raisers in their home for Democratic candidates.
"If money equals power, we would have been a lot further along than
we are new, given all of the money the gay community has spent" on
campaigns over the years.

In the meantime, Bohnett keeps working to make a difference. Says
the philanthropist: "I really have a longtime vision of social
change and social justice, what it takes to change people's
attitude--and what it takes to make the world a better
place."--Patrick Range McDonald

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HOWARD BUFORD

Adman

GROWING UP IN OHIO in the '60s, the son of a surgeon dad and a
social worker morn, Howard Buford adored the familiar characters who
hawked products in TV commercials--Mr. Whipple for Charmin, Madge for
Palmolive, and Mrs. Olson for Folgers coffee. "I was always
interested in advertising," he says, "in crafting messages and
influencing people."

But one commercial he remembers not so fondly was for a facial
tissue promising "skin as soft and white as snow." As a black
person, he was irked by the assumption that all skin was white.
"Who wasn't on TV, and why, and what that meant"
preoccupied him.

Buford, 49, went on to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard
Business School, then became one of the few African-Americans to climb
the ranks of Madison Avenue in the '80s (where he told colleagues
he was gay "when they asked--but they didn't really
ask"). But those early memories partly explain why, in 1990, he
started his own ad agency, Prime Access, one of the first to target
people of color, lesbians, and gay men. Today, the agency employs 44
people, and it billed $71 million in 2007.

What does he love most about his job 18 years later?
"Providing opportunities for folks to create messages that might
not be created," says Buford, who lives on Manhattan's Upper
West Side with his partner of nearly nine years, Jeffrey.

Those messages are proudly displayed in the lobby of the Prime
Access offices in New York City. Ads for the anticholesterol drug Zocor,
cast with middle-aged couples who are black rather than white. A Hyatt
ad featuring two hot shirtless men embracing under a waterfall. The ad
that broke Volvo into the gay market, featuring a racial rainbow of gay
and lesbian couples, some with kids and dogs. And the ad for season 1 of
Queer as Folk: "Showtime leads you where American TV has never gone
before."

Before he went solo, Buford distinguished himself in-house at
Procter & Gamble (working on big products such as Tide and Cheer),
then at Young & Rubicam, where he worked on the Jell-O campaign,
which featured Bill Cosby's iconic commercials. As one of the few
high-placed blacks in advertising, he was all too familiar with the
industry's bottom-line-driven racism. "Someone would suggest
having a main character be African-American," he says, "but
there was so much second-guessing of whether the client would accept it,
they'd finally say, 'Let's just cast it nonethnic,
general market'--all those words that mean 'Let's use
white people, please.'"

Advertising to both people of color and to gays and lesbians has
grown so sophisticated since then that it sometimes blurs with
mainstream advertising. But Buford doesn't think that Prime Access
will bill itself into extinction anytime soon. "We didn't have
women of color in [mainstream] makeup ads until the late 1990s," he
says. "I think it's going to be a while" before gay
couples show up matter-of-factly in mainline ad campaigns.--Tim Murphy

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

ILENE C. SHANE

Chocolatier

OCCUPYING A SPARTAN WHITE FLOOR of a discreet building in the
Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, SweetBliss lacks the flowing
cocoa river and OompaLoompas of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Yet it does boast a wonderful Wonka in Ilene C. Shane, who spends her
days concocting uber-decadent indulgences like the Black & White
Moo--a hockey puck-like Belgian chocolate shell packed with homemade
vanilla marshmallow, caramel, and graham cracker--the banana pecan fudge
Bliss-on-a-Stick, and chocolate Poppin' Lips.

Shane, a gregarious woman wearing a grass-toned Chef Works coat,
hands me the latter to sample and I quickly learn where the
"poppin'" comes from--Pop Rocks are embedded throughout
the dark chocolate lips. My face registers surprise, and Shane grins ear
to ear.

"For other chocolatiers, maybe it's all about the
chocolate and not about people," she says. "I want to see
somebody take the first bite of a Moo. I want to hear the crackle of the
shell, see the sugar-rush thing, the eyes get brighter and bigger. I
guess I like shock value."

Born in New York in 1955 to a big-band musician father and
healthy-cooking homemaker mother, Shane started her culinary career as
Ralph Lauren's personal chef. During her eight-year tenure with him
she expanded her cooking repertoire, met the occasional icon, forged
valuable connections, and was ultimately inspired to create her own
company.

In 2001, Shane did just that. She and her life partner, Iris Libby,
pitched SweetBliss products to Bergdorf Goodman, and the store's
buyers were blown away.

Within three months, a 13-item line was launched, and within six
years SweetBliss transitioned from an operation run in Shane and
Libby's 2,200-square-foot apartment to a 10-employee factory
producing an ever-expanding line of Moos, clusters, brittles, and
crunches. "They're the anti-bonbon," says Shane of her
sweets. "They're indulgent, big, and not just
pop-in-your-mouth bite-size. I like to have the indulgences be
naughty."

Out since age 21, Shane feels that being gay has made her braver
but says her sexuality is irrelevant to the business itself. "I
introduced Iris to Martha Stewart as my partner. Ralph had her as a
guest. And I'm always happy to hear someone's gay when I
interview them."

As for the chocolates themselves?

"The most lesbian thing about my chocolates?" she muses.
"They like to get eaten!"--Larry Ferber

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